> Similarly, Rubino says web apps in Firefox will not use a minimal browser frame and will continue to show a main toolbar with address bar, extensions, bookmarks...
Why is this so hard to understand? Why are they so against just making it work like it's supposed to? PWAs are actively useful and great and this is just frustrating.
Any person's first contact with a PWA is going to be in the full-chrome browser. The user has to voluntarily choose "install as web app" to actually lose the browser chrome. Not giving users this choice and opting them into a windowed mode forever makes PWA support largely useless -- just open the app from your bookmarks!
Isn’t there a middle where you don’t show the whole browser chrome by default and still allow access to the extensions? Maybe add a tiny button to show the browser UI or add a shortcut?
That is how it works in Chrome, right? Or am I going insane? When I open a web app I made with Chrome, there's a small icon in the top right of my window that opens the extensions dropdown.
From the Connect post I gather that a middle ground is basically the plan - you'll still have e.g. your extensions accessible, but there won't be a tab bar.
Which is an issue I haven't had with Chrome or Gnome Web ('s version of extensions), even with things like VSCode which overrides the title bar as well
There is clearly a use case for keeping the whole UI. But it is the major use case and should the whole product philosophy be based on it ?
I feel there will be more sites where the URL won't matter or where the user will prefer simplicity to control.
I use Google Maps 99.99% in PWA mode and never mourned the lack of the URl bar, especially as I can open the site in normal browser mode anytime I ever want the full controls.
I'd be fine with a 2~3 click operation to get the URL.
Which is basically how it works in Chrome in PWA mode: a few basic actions (get the URL, print, cast, adjust zoom etc) in a menu, and an option to punt it to the full chrome if needed.
Every PWA starts in a webpage, and you have to manually install it as PWA.
If it's important for you to see the url, use it in the browser and don't install it? Installation only makes sense if the website/app is build for it.
I have learned a long time ago not to make claims about how hard it is to implement something in other people's projects - I get it wrong often enough about my own.
(Also, I don't think there's a single "PWA spec".)
Firefox's UI can be easily tweaked with CSS. It's trivial, for example, to get rid of all chrome. The real problem is their ideological stance against PWAs.
It's definitely doable to make the bar disappear with a tiny bit of CSS. Did it myself in the past and the Firefox team does it partially for their vertical tabs feature
My take is they just want the 'browser' to be visible, kinda like how banks insist on their logos being visible on co-branded credit cards. Considering Firefox is nearly entirely how Mozilla makes money, and that browser has been disappearing more and more starting with Chrome's launch way back in 2008, this just feels like pearl clutching.
> Considering Firefox is nearly entirely how Mozilla makes money,
Is it? I thought they made money by taking it from theGoogs to be the "default" search when theGoogs probably thinks of it as ensuring there is "competition" so they are not tagged as monopoly. Same as the payment they make to Apple
I’m not sure what Mozilla has been doing the last ten years but I’m fairly certain it has little to do with what users want.
I am thoroughly finished with them as an organization; hopefully they represent the end of an ugly era, which to my recollection began in about 2013. I will not mourn their inevitable slide into complete irrelevance and financial insolvency.
Someone can fork chromium if need be. There are at least a couple organizations with chromium-based browsers that have maintained their own engines in the past. Chromium is objectively very good so it’s not like it’s the time when we were left with IE5. The biggest problem now is Google trying to protect their ad business and the other Chromium browsers have been working around that. I don’t think we are nearly as bad off as we have at other times in the past.
I was referring to Safari here. I'm aware that WebKit is cross-platform, but it has vanishingly small market share if you ignore Safari, and it doesn't provide sufficient competition to browsers based on Chromium/Blink to keep the web from being a monoculture.
> but it has vanishingly small market share if you ignore Safari
Safari doesn't help here because it's proprietary and only runs on one family of OSes. WebKit doesn't have any substantive market share without Safari.
And they wrote their comment using Chrome or some skin. Which they have used for a decade. Because the button on the left seemed off on Firefox compared to Chrome (always something). So fuck Firefox.
You have the wrong expectations toward HN :) It's a lot less frustrating if you correct them.
It's the community forum for a US-based, web-heavy startup accelerator, not a "hacker's corner" in terms of the original scene. The priorities and values and interests do differ.
I think such types are frustrated because they have enough domain specific knowledge to know the basics of how to fix their pet hate. But realise they will never have the motivation, skill and dedication required to follow through.
I have been installing some PWAs lately at work and... I love them. They have been replacing the need for electron and they also feel integrated with the OS.
In chrome, there is always a button to "bring back" the app from pwa into a browser tab (really nice). There is the option to open links directly in the pwa, you can access your extension from a small icon.
I read that on the specs there might be an option to keep tabs around, for things like notion where your might need tabs (that would be really cool).
Overall, I'm impressed positively. Apple it's right to be scared about those, I would use PWAs for everything that's online for sure, for stuff that's offline probably too.
Mozilla were ruined by big Google checks. How they could let this opportunity slip while electron became the ui for every major desktop app… such a shame.
Personally, I feel Mozilla did not market XUL[1] enough. Had they done that, it could have become what Electron is today, with a native look and feel, and with a much reduced footprint while still offering a JS-based runtime for applications.
They had support for PWA in 2021, before they pulled it. Hard to see this is anything other than a concession to its biggest funder, Google. Chrome, Edge and Safari all support installing PWAs, while FF, the biggest beneficiary of such a change, intentionally gimped theirs.
Why would I want to use a pwa that hides the things that allow me to control what the browser does? I actively use websites over apps solely because I have more control over the interaction.
Perhaps because you've chosen to install a PWA instead of continuing to use the website? The experience is different, if you want a browser like environment, just use the browser.
This whole article leaves me thinking that they just reinvented having a separate window for each page, and are just calling them "taskbar tabs" instead of "windows". After inventing tabs, we've now come full circle.
What do you mean? I can have an app that i use a lot in its separate window accessible by cmd+tab, without unnecessary toolbars on top, it's not hidden among tens of other browser tabs and windows i have open. Works offline. That seems quite useful to me.
For the first time ever, it is possible to build an app that runs on anything that can run webkit.
I use the same app on iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Debian, even GrapheneOS. No AppStore, no account needed.
I think it benefits or at least could benefit the end user a lot in the long term, but it hurts the walled/semiwalled gardens of MS, Apple and Google and their business. Which is why they seem so reluctant to support it better.
How Firefox does not see this potential app freedom is beyond me.
I don't really understand what this is for then if it doesn't spawn in a minimal frame. This is somehow worse than just having a shortcut to open the app in a regular browser tab.
Yesterday afternoon I transitioned from Brave to Firefox. Brave was struggling, admittedly after a system uptime of 69 days, even after killing it brave would regularly struggle and do a whole ton of disc I/O, bringing my system to its knees. Rebooting fixes it, FYI, but it seems weird that "pkill -f brave" doesn't seem to resolve it. Slack also has similar struggles, this is under Ubuntu 22.04.
So far Firefox has been a bit rocky, I don't seem to be able to open Jira tickets. Some might consider that a feature, but my job isn't one of them. That's shaken my faith in Firefox more than a bit.
If you have site-specific issues, if you're up to it it would be great if you could report it via the menu (or Help, on MacOS) -> Report broken site, or via https://webcompat.com.
FWIW my default Firefox profile is chock full of content blockers, so I expect demanding sites to fail on first load. I grant additional permissions manually, when I must.
But I had no (extra) trouble opening Jira tickets a few months ago when working with a partner integration.
Why is this so hard to understand? Why are they so against just making it work like it's supposed to? PWAs are actively useful and great and this is just frustrating.